All of This and All of That: A Brief Ponderation on the Constitutive Contradictions of Brazilian Modernism

Abstract

Brazilian writers and works from the first decades of the 20th century are constantly under accusations of not being truly modern, either by the difference and distance between avant-garde realizations of Brazilian and the European models, or by the absence of discussion about national identity, or even by the confusing and blurred contours between national and local identity. However, considering Marshall Berman's remark that Modernity and in its artistic expression, Modernism –, one is not this or that (Either/Or) but it is this and that (Both/And), the historical experience and the modern art could admit the dialectic survival of contradictions, even if they, a priori, did not coexist. From the analysis of the poem “Saudade”, published in Sérgio Milliet's book Poemas análogos (1927), in which contradictions, decadent themes, classical forms and romantic images cohabit with avant-garde techniques and modern diction and irony, we can understand and better interpret the Brazilian Modernism, reflecting on the contradictions of the social experience of Modernity in Brazil. In this way, we avoid confining the discussion to the arguments of insufficiency, impossibilities, mistakes, and “never being modern”, that haunt Brazilian and Latin American Modernism.